1) Will The Sun Put The Brakes On Global Warming?Fox News, 16 July 2017Michael GuillenThe sun is like a teenager that cycles through mood swings – from dramatic to chill and back again – roughly every eleven years. But this time it’s different. It now appears the sun is heading for a rare, super-chill period that threatens to add some unexpected drama to today’s climate change discussion.

click on image to watch videoFor most of its history, science believed the sun’s output was constant. It was wrong. Today, we realize that lots of things about the sun wax and wane every eleven years, most notably its brightness and the number of explosive disturbances on its surface called sunspots and faculae.That’s not all. The eleven-year cycle itself snakes up and down like a roller coaster, reaching “grand maxima” and “grand minima” every 100-200 years. The last grand maximum peaked circa 1958, after which the sun has been steadily quieting down. Today, the drop in activity is at its steepest in 9,300 years.Is the sun headed for a grand minimum? If so, it immediately calls to mind the famous Maunder Minimum, during which the sun languished for seventy years. From 1645 to 1715 the sun’s brightness dimmed by a fraction of one percent and the number of sunspots and faculae plummeted to nearly zero.On top of that, the Maunder Minimum occurred precisely during the coldest part of the centuries-long Little Ice Age, when the average temperature of the northern hemisphere dropped by about 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit. Was it a coincidence? Or did the Maunder Minimum help drive the ice age? Here’s where the story about today’s apparent plunge toward a solar grand minimum really heats up.According to NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Earth’s temperature has increased by about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880, roughly the end of the Little Ice Age. The worst warming is yet to come, most scientists claim, and not even a grand solar minimum will prevent it.Using computer simulations, scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, estimate that “a grand solar minimum in the middle of the 21st century would slow down human-caused global warming and reduce the relative increase of surface temperatures by several tenths of a degree [Celsius, equal to about 0.5 degrees Fahrenheit].” But at the end of the grand minimum, they say, the warming would simply pick up where it left off.“Therefore … a grand solar minimum would slow down and somewhat delay, but not stop, human-caused global warming.”But the sun’s dramatic quiescence comes with a surprising complication: cosmic rays. They are subatomic particles – mainly protons and helium nuclei – that originate from somewhere deep within our galaxy. Their source is still a mystery.Usually, the sun’s powerful magnetic field and radioactive winds keep cosmic rays away from our neighborhood. But when the sun weakens, the cosmic rays are freer to move in and bombard Earth. New research shows that upon striking the atmosphere, cosmic rays produce showers of particles and ions that seed clouds with extraordinary efficiency. The increased cloudiness shades Earth from the sun.Recently, a team of Russian scientists compared the cosmic-ray cooling mechanism to two other well-known drivers of climate change – the sun’s inconstant brightness and greenhouse gases. Publishing in the “Bulletin of the Russian Academy of Sciences: Physics,” they maintain the cosmic-ray cooling phenomenon will dominate everything else in the coming decades and actually force a period of global cooling.It is a radical hypothesis, to be sure, but even mainstream scientists monitoring the sun’s rapidly flagging behavior agree the growing likelihood of a grand minimum is stirring up a grand maximum of uncertainty and excitement.Full story2) The Hiatus: One Message For Politicians, Another For ScientistsGWPF Observatory, 17 July 2017 Dr David Whitehouse, GWPF Science EditorPoliticians are usually seen as fair game for criticism especially if they talk about the inconvenient details of climate change. If only they would stick to the simplicities and repeat the mantra that climate change is real and happening and we are entirely to blame. Woe betide any politician who delves into the detail. Usually we like our politicians to get down amongst the minutiae of government, but not when it comes to climate change.This is what happened when the Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt discussed the surface temperature hiatus of the past 20 years. In written comments to the U.S. Senate about his confirmation hearing on the 18th of January he wrote, “over the past two decades satellite data indicates there has been a leveling off of warming.”Despite the vigorous debate about the hiatus in the peer-reviewed literature this was seen by some as such an incorrect statement that a response had to be made, and fast.Ben Santer of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was quick off the mark putting together a paper for the journal Nature Scientific Reports. It looked at satellite measurements of the temperature of the atmosphere close to the ground from when such data first became available in 1979. It concluded: Satellite temperature measurements do not support the recent claim of a “leveling off of warming” over the past two decades. Tropospheric warming trends over recent 20-year periods, the authors concluded, are always significantly larger (at the 10% level or better) than model estimates of 20-year trends arising from natural internal variability.Ben Santer on the Seth Myers Show.The Nature Scientific Reports paper was submitted on 6th March, accepted on the 4th of April and published on the 24th May. But as that paper, with its simple message that Pruitt was wrong, was being written another paper on the same topic and also involving Santer was already in the works. It had been submitted three months before, on the 23rd of December the previous year.It was eventually published in Nature Geoscience on 19th June having been accepted on the 22nd of May. It comes to an entirely different conclusion about the hiatus. “We find that in the last two decades of the twentieth century, differences between modelled and observed tropospheric temperature trends are broadly consistent with internal variability. Over most of the early twenty-first century, however, model tropospheric warming is substantially larger than observed; warming rate differences are generally outside the range of trends arising from internal variability…We conclude that model overestimation of tropospheric warming in the early twenty-first century is partly due to systematic deficiencies in some of the post-2000 external forcings used in the model simulations.”In other words the climate models have failed. They did not predict and they cannot explain the hiatus. To reach this conclusion the Nature Geoscience paper analysed trends in the satellite data over 10, 12, 14, 16 and 18 years because the researchers said that they are typical record lengths used for the study of the ‘warming slowdown’ in the early 21st century. Note they did not analyse trends over 20 years directly. Thus the first Santer et al. paper analysed the past 20 years and concluded there was no hiatus, while his second paper concluded there was a hiatus of up to 18 years, the maximum period that paper studied.The authors realised the problem of the two papers seemingly conflicting results. To avoid any confusion they issued a helpful Q&A document saying the results were not contradictory but complimentary. It must be said that two methods they used are only very slightly different. On would expect them to give the same result. But that does not matter. If as the authors say the results are complimentary why was the result that disagreed with Pruitt used with no qualification or hint that a similar technique showed the opposite?On the 22nd February Ben Santer on appeared on the Seth Meyers chat show saying these are strange and unusual times, something that with hindsight is laced with irony. He was introduced as being from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory but stated he was talking as a private citizen about research he had done and published on behalf of the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

U.S. Senator Ted Cruz on the Seth Myers Show in March 2015.Santer aimed his sights at a statement made by U.S. Senator Ted Cruz statement made on the same show two years earlier:“Many of the alarmists on global warming, they got a problem because the science doesn’t back them up. And in particular, satellite data demonstrates for the last 17 years, there’s been zero warming. None whatsoever. “Santer challenged Senator Cruz in direct contradiction of his own paper he had submitted but wasn’t published yet:“Listen to what he (Cruz) said. Satellite data. So satellite measurements of atmospheric temperature show no significant warming over the last 17 years, and we tested it. We looked at all of the satellite data in the world, from all groups, and wanted to see, was he right or not? And he was wrong. Even if you focus on a small segment of the now 38-year satellite temperature record – the last 17 years – was demonstrably wrong.”Santer concluded “So the bizarre thing is, Senator Cruz is a lawyer. He’s got to look at all of the evidence when he’s trying a case, when he’s involved in a case, not just one tiny segment of the evidence.”Oh the irony.Feedback: david.whitehouse@thegwpf.com3) Tired Of Being Wrong, Climate Alarmists Move Doomsday To Next CenturyIndependent Journal Review, 16 July 2017If the climate alarmists weren’t still so politically powerful and represented in Congress by their devoted cult members, it would almost be easy to pity them. Why? Because they’re so spectacularly wrong about so many things.They keep the hype coming regardless, as in this article that cites the fact that it’s hot in the desert in the summertime to say that air travel may be doomed.The cult’s leader — Al Gore — said in 2009 that there was a 75 percent chance that the entire arctic polar ice cap would melt by 2014.It’s still there.The year before the North Pole was supposed to be gone, noted climate scientist Hans von Storch went against cult orthodoxy in an interview with Spiegel Online in 2013 and had some interesting things to say about the climate prediction models so revered by the alarmists.After noting that “climate change seems to be taking a break,” von Storch had this to say about the models:“If things continue as they have been, in five years, at the latest, we will need to acknowledge that something is fundamentally wrong with our climate models. A 20-year pause in global warming does not occur in a single modeled scenario. But even today, we are finding it very difficult to reconcile actual temperature trends with our expectations.”He followed that up with this after being asked what might be wrong with the models:“There are two conceivable explanations — and neither is very pleasant for us. The first possibility is that less global warming is occurring than expected because greenhouse gases, especially CO2, have less of an effect than we have assumed. This wouldn’t mean that there is no man-made greenhouse effect, but simply that our effect on climate events is not as great as we have believed. The other possibility is that, in our simulations, we have underestimated how much the climate fluctuates owing to natural causes.”After so many swings and misses while attempting to predict doomsday as being just around the corner, the alarmists have decided to provide themselves a little cover:Climate alarmist James Hansen’s prediction of Manhattan being underwater by 2018 seems to not be happening, so he’s moving his own goal posts and saying “50 to 150 years” now.That’s the beauty of being one of the “we believe in science” people: there’s never any penalty for being wrong. Every prediction that doesn’t come true isn’t a cause for reflection about perhaps adjusting the conclusion; it’s merely an opportunity to pull a new prediction out of thin air.Perhaps they are finally getting embarrassed, though. Tossing all of the predictions a century down the road at least saves them from having to be around when those are proved wrong.Full post4) Trump Will Betray U.S. Voters On Climate & Reverse Paris Exit, Macron PredictsThe Times, 17 July 2017 Charles BremnerPresident Macron believes that he may have persuaded President Trump to reverse his decision to pull the United States out of the UN Paris agreement on curbing climate change.

“Donald Trump listened to me. He understood the sense of my approach,” the French leader said after the state visit to Paris ended on Friday. “He told me that he would try to find a solution in the coming months. We talked in detail about what could enable him to come back into the Paris accords.”Mr Macron also spoke of his first phone conversation with President Putin after his election win in May. He said that Mr Putin acknowledged that there had been Russian interference in the campaign but insisted that it was carried out by individuals, not the state.During the G7 summit in Italy in May, Mr Trump refused to endorse the Paris agreement. However, during his visit last week, he said: “Something could happen with respect to the Paris accord . . . but we will talk about that over the coming period of time.”Mr Macron told Le Journal du Dimanche that Mr Trump had been influenced by the way that American city officials and business leaders had continued to support the agreement and that he understood the French argument that climate change contributed to terrorism. Mr Macron believes that extreme weather is worsening the migration crisis and provoking conflict over dwindling resources.Full story5) Reality Check: Trump To Steer UN Global Warming Funds To Coal, Gas ProjectsDaily Caller, 14 July 2017Michael BastaschThe Trump administration will use its position as a donor to the Green Climate Fund (GCF) to steer money towards coal-fired power plants and natural gas infrastructure, according to an unnamed White House official.President Donald Trump will do his best to use the Obama administration’s $1 billion donation to the GCF to “advance American-energy interests globally,” the official told Bloomberg.Trump will build on his G20 pledge to “work closely with other countries to help them access and use fossil fuels more cleanly and efficiently,” and has already begun rolling back Obama-era restrictions on international financing of coal plants.Trump pledged to eliminate funding for UN global warming programs, but his administration still has a seat at the negotiating table, thanks to the $1 billion the Obama administration handed the GCF before leaving office.The GCF was set up in 2010 for rich countries to deposit money that would be used to fund green energy and global warming mitigation projects in poor countries. President Barack Obama pledged $3 billion to the fund, but only gave $1 billion.The GCF became a major focus in the negotiations of the Paris climate accord, and would play a role in the $100 billion per year pledge for climate funding rich countries made to poor ones.Trump announced that he would withdraw from the Paris accord in early June, but his administration will work to make sure that taxpayer dollars already handed over to the UN help advance U.S. interests.Environmentalists were outraged at the news, and the Sierra Club’s John Coequyt said that Trump’s plan is like “taking the fire department’s budget and using it to pour gasoline on the blaze.”Trump’s energy policy centers around U.S. “energy dominance,” rather than fighting global warming. The president called the Paris accord a plan to redistribute wealth from the U.S. to economic competitors, like China, who would not be bound to reduce emissions and could get money from the UN.“This agreement is less about the climate and more about other countries gaining a financial advantage over the United States,” Trump said in early June when announcing his intention to withdraw from the agreement.Full post6) Miranda Devine:Fear Is The Business Model That Has Made Al Gore RichDaily Telegraph, 16 July 2017Scaremongering is what Gore does best, and fear is the business model that has made him rich, though his every apocalyptic scenario has failed to materialise.

IN Al Gore’s latest cinematic dose of climate scaremongering, a young Asian man is crying.“I feel so scared” he wails, before vision of solicitous uncle Al patting his hand in an attempt to soothe away his fears of the apocalypse.Scaremongering is what Gore does best, and fear is the business model that has made him rich, though his every apocalyptic scenario has failed to materialise.In Australia last week to spruik his upcoming movie An Inconvenient Sequel, the former US vice president tried it on again, claiming Mother Nature was “screaming” and the world would ­descend into “political disruption and chaos and diseases, stronger storms and more ­destructive floods” unless we buy his snake oil.Silly Labor premiers bought that snake oil last week, pledging alongside the grinning Gore that Victoria, Queensland, the ACT and South Australia would embrace renewables to produce zero net emissions by 2050.They haven’t learned the lesson from SA’s extreme green experiment with renewable energy that has produced nothing but crippling blackouts and the highest electricity prices in the world.Any normal person with such a woeful record of accuracy as Gore would be ashamed to show his face. Eleven years after his Inconvenient Truth movie scared little kids witless, his warnings of climate armageddon have come to nothing.“Unless we take drastic measures the world would reach a point of no return within 10 years,” he told us then. Wrong. In fact the world has just been through almost 20 years in which there has been a hiatus in global warming, even as carbon dioxide has increased: an “inconvenient pause” as some wags put it.Around the world people are waking up to the fact that their leaders have been crying wolf, while their electricity bills go through the roof.Australia’s prosperity is built on the reams of cheap, abundant fossil fuel under our feet, and yet green zealots have forced us into an energy crisis.But when Liberal backbencher Craig Kelly last week pointed out the logical fact that Australians will die because of high power bills, he was slammed as a “scaremonger” by the very people who worship at Al Gore’s feet.Yes, cold kills, and electricity prices have doubled in the past decade, as uncertainty plagues the energy sector, and cheap coal-fired power is priced out of the market by government subsidies for unreliable renewable energy production.The states, which bear much of the blame, continue with the fantasy that you can replace coal with wind and solar while simultaneously banning the development of onshore gas fields.The iron-clad law of ­energy supply is that more ­renewables force out baseload power, which you need when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow.Yet SA is pretending that the world’s biggest battery built at huge taxpayer expense by another global green huckster, Elon Musk, is going to save the day.The diabolic task facing federal Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg is to wrangle agreement on something approaching a rational energy policy out of the recently ­released Finkel Review.Unlike Donald Trump, this government doesn’t have an electoral mandate for pulling out of the Paris treaty.Full post7) AP Style Guide Warns Against Legitimising Climate ScepticsPoliZette, 13 July 2017Thomas RichardIn the new edition, the AP Stylebook tells journalists to stop calling climate change skeptics “deniers.”The 2017 Associated Press (AP) yearly style guide is out, and it boasts numerous changes where the wire service again favors liberal biases over impartiality or conservative ideals. This is most telling in areas of abortion, illegal immigrants, terrorism, guns, and climate change.The AP Stylebook is ostensibly a middle-of-the-road guide that most journalists can rely on for universal rules on grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and word choice. Yet with each edition, AP’s covert bias becomes more pronounced, none more so than this year.Even climate change has been updated. Having previously told journalists to refer to global warming as “climate change” and to call climate change skeptics “doubters,” AP is ready to move on and squash the climate resistance once and for all.In the new edition, the AP Stylebook tells journalists to stop calling climate change skeptics “deniers.” It tells writers to “describe those who don’t accept climate science or dispute that the world is warming from man-made forces” and “use climate change doubters or those who reject mainstream climate science. Avoid use of skeptics or deniers.”But above all, never use the word “skeptic,” the guide warns. Skepticism is one of the very cornerstones that science is built upon. Calling someone a skeptic invites discussion and tells the reader that other people don’t subscribe to all tenets of global warming theory. In an attempt to dismiss skeptics, writers and editors use the pejorative term “deniers” in copy in both print and web.The new entry also includes a lengthy dissection on why man-made global warming is backed up by verifiable, accurate substantiation. Sounding like PolitiFact, AP instructs journalists that climate change theory is now fact and man-made warming is the consensus belief. But there’s no such thing as consensus in science, and climate change theory changes weekly.Yet despite that none of the catastrophic global warming predictions are coming true, AP is as resolute as ever in its issuance of these stylistic guidelines. Writers, meet your new science overlords.Most journalists, especially those at The New York Times and Washington Post, went out of their way to call Scott Pruitt a climate denier when President Donald Trump first nominated him as EPA administrator.After first running a rather benign, well-informed online article about the announcement, The Times’ bias police descended from grappling hooks and rewrote the headline to include the words ‘climate denier’ and surreptitiously added a new paragraph detailing Pruitt’s alleged links to Big Oil.The slanted edits were uncovered by The Daily Caller. The outlet caught the online revisions via screen captures.Full post

The London-based Global Warming Policy Forum is a world leading think tank on global warming policy issues. The GWPF newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website atwww.thegwpf.com.

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